Chinese-Uyghur Bilingual Lexicon Extraction Based on Weak Supervision

Abstract

Bilingual lexicon extraction is useful, especially for low-resource languages that can leverage from high-resource languages. The Uyghur language is a derivative language, and its language resources are scarce and noisy. Moreover, it is difficult to find a bilingual resource to utilize the linguistic knowledge of other large resource languages, such as Chinese or English. There is little related research on unsupervised extraction for the Chinese-Uyghur languages, and the existing methods mainly focus on term extraction methods based on translated parallel corpora. Accordingly, unsupervised knowledge extraction methods are effective, especially for the low-resource languages. This paper proposes a method to extract a Chinese-Uyghur bilingual dictionary by combining the inter-word relationship matrix mapped by the neural network cross-language word embedding vector. A seed dictionary is used as a weak supervision signal. A small Chinese-Uyghur parallel data resource is used to map the multilingual word vectors into a unified vector space. As the word-particles of these two languages are not well-coordinated, stems are used as the main linguistic particles. The strong inter-word semantic relationship of word vectors is used to associate Chinese-Uyghur semantic information. Two retrieval indicators, such as nearest neighbor retrieval and cross-domain similarity local scaling, are used to calculate similarity to extract bilingual dictionaries. The experimental results show that the accuracy of the Chinese-Uyghur bilingual dictionary extraction method proposed in this paper is improved to 65.06%. This method helps to improve Chinese-Uyghur machine translation, automatic knowledge extraction, and multilingual translations.

Keywords

• bilingual dictionary
• seed dictionary
• cross-language word embedding